The Intruders (42 page)

The join in the window splintered. I tore off the pieces of frame around it until there was a big enough hole. Went back a couple of steps up the ladder, then swung my foot and kicked. The first impact told me the board was damp and wouldn’t hold for long. A grinding sound said the escape brackets wouldn’t either.

“Get ready!” I shouted. The area of board directly in front of my boot split, breaking inward. I moved down a step, started kicking again. The fire escape above me gave out a loud, grinding sound, and for an instant I felt weightless.

Fisher’s head jerked out of the window above. His face was white. I was now very aware of how far I was above the ground. “Jack…”

“Wait until I get in,” I said. “This isn’t going to take both of us at once.”

I shoved the broken board with my hand, holding the frame to minimize the stress on the brackets. The board started to push away from the wall, and a chunk bent inward, wide enough for me to get my head and an arm in. I knocked away the bigger pieces of glass left around the sill and levered the upper half of my body through.

Couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t get to the flashlight, stuck in my pocket. So I kept shoving against the plywood, pulling myself over the sill until I toppled forward to the floor inside, making ringing contact with an iron radiator under the sill.

I got up quickly and stuck my head back out the hole, yanking more of the board away. “Come on. Now.”

Fisher’s feet emerged from the window above. The escape made a grinding noise again, and this time it was longer, like an old door opening. There was a thunk, too, and a small fragment of metal dropped past my face.

“Shit,” Fisher said. “One of the supports just—”

He took the last three steps in one. I grabbed his hands and started pulling, but he’d given himself a good push with both legs and came through fast enough to knock me over onto my back.

“If we can’t get out of this room, I’m going to kill you,” Fisher said, wiping the blood off his palms.

The flashlight showed a room cluttered with upturned furniture, boxes, and inky shadows, filled up almost to the door. We made our way across quickly, shuffling our feet against obstructions on the floor.

We got to the door and threw our shoulders against it together. Banged them hard and fast and with something approaching panic. In the end I pushed Fisher to one side and forced myself to go at it the right way, ducking low and hitting it where it would make the lock casement splinter fastest. When it started to go, I switched to kicking.

Fisher joined me again, and finally the door blew open and we crashed out onto the landing. We ran down to the second floor, around the landing there.

I was heading straight for the stairs to get down to the next but Fisher grabbed my arm.

“What’s that?” he whispered.

I heard something, too. A sound from below.

I went to the top of the stairs. From there I could make out hard breathing, someone moaning softly.

We had no other way to go. I kept my back to the wall. Fisher followed two steps behind. When I hit the half landing, I shone the light directly below.

There was a man lying on the floor. A dark pool around him said he was bleeding to death. He slowly wrenched his head up as we came down to reach him.

It was Todd Crane.

chapter
FORTY

It was too dark to see, but the stifling air and heavy smells of brick and earth were all too familiar. Madison knew she’d been here before, in dreams and nightmares. Though the man inside kept her plunging forward into the dark, if felt like he was pulling her backward. The darkness didn’t bother Marcus. He knew he had nothing to fear from it. Madison did not want to have him in her head anymore, but it didn’t feel as if she had any choice; if anything, it felt like it was she who was being shoved out. He was increasingly out of control now, too—or she was less able to stop him from doing the kind of thing he’d always wanted. She hadn’t known he was going to stab Rachel’s father—she’d just found herself doing it, before she could do anything to try to stop it. He’d been angry that the woman he wanted to see wasn’t here after all, that this was supposed to be a trap, though Madison believed he’d known this was a possibility all along, that his anger was partly a pose, and this was all just part of the endless game he played with whoever was available.

There were huge amounts of blood all over Madison’s hands and coat, and now she could remember shoving the nice woman in the Scatter Creek restroom, tripping her so she fell and smashed her head against the side of the toilet bowl. Tears were running down her face. She was unaware of them. She was pulled ever forward, as if someone had tied ropes to her arms and legs and was tugging her deeper into the cloud.

Marcus wasn’t interested in the upper part of the building, it seemed. He’d brought her straight down into the basement, opening the door with the second key on the ring from the envelope Madison had carried since Portland. He was muttering things to himself, things she hated to hear in her own voice…horrible, sick things, tasting his own memories on his tongue. Rarely did he use the lighter he’d taken from Rachel, holding it up to get his bearings, before plunging onward into the blackness.

After a couple of minutes, the echoes were different, and Madison realized they’d come into a bigger space. Marcus dragged her onward, not caring if she crashed into things or fell or cut herself.

She stepped on something crackly on the floor, and he paused, her face splitting with his grin, but there was something far more important in this place, something he was desperate to see again and for which this man felt the closest he was ever going to feel to love.

He scrabbled on over piles of chairs and boxes. He flicked the lighter once again, and Madison saw they were in a long, low room now, like a bunker. At the far end was another doorway, blackness beyond. There was a shape to one side of it. It was slumped in a chair.

When Marcus saw this, he caught his/her breath, holding the lighter up above her head until it got so hot that Madison cried out. Then he let it go out and started toward the corner again, like someone going home.

“You have to warn her,” Crane said. His voice was weak.

“Warn who? About what?”

I was squatted next to him, trying to establish where and how he’d been hurt. So far all I could see was blood, and all I could tell was that it was bad.

“Marcus is back.”

“What?” I said.

“Marcus Fox,” Fisher said, misunderstanding me. “The other man on the documents for this building. The one I couldn’t find anything about for the last ten years.”

“You wouldn’t,” Crane said. “He was dead. You’ve got to warn her. Warn Rose.”

My hands froze, and I stared at him. “Rose? How do you know about Rose? Who is she?”

His eyes were unfocused. “Oh, you know Rose,” he said, with affection and bitterness. “Everybody knows…”

His face contorted, and the words became a sharp intake of breath.

“Where did he go? Marcus?”

His face slack, Crane jerked his head to the left.

“In one of those rooms?”

He shook his head. I flicked the flashlight down along the corridor toward the back of the building.

“Into the basement,” Fisher said.

I thought for a second. Amy and the Zimmermans would be long gone by now. There was no point in my running after them. “Gary, go out on the street and get help. Quickly. Get an ambulance.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Find the person who did this.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No. This guy’s badly fucked up. He needs an ambulance, and he needs it now.”

Fisher pushed past me and headed along the corridor. “I don’t care. I have to know what’s down there.”

“For God’s sake.”

I started to move back past Todd toward the street door, but his hand reached out and grabbed my leg. “Don’t let him go down there alone,” he said. “He’ll die.”

“Todd, you need a doctor.”

“Go after him,” he insisted. “Please.” His eyes were strong again, for the moment. “Or he will die.”

I hesitated. “Hold your hands over the wound,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I ran back toward the staircase down into the basement. Fisher was already heading down the steps.

“You’re an asshole,” I said, shining the light so he could see his way into the darkness. He just started descending more quickly. The stairs hit a return halfway down and kept going. There was a full story below-ground, which didn’t make much sense. I knew that there were areas like this in the old town, but here?

We came off the bottom into an open space. There was a door on the left side. Beyond it lay ser vice areas, full of pipes and dampness. There was another door on the right, hanging open. It was three inches thick, with the same reinforcing we’d seen on the top floor. I pointed the flashlight through the gap. A narrow corridor led away into total darkness.

Fisher went through. I followed. The walls on the other side were of old brickwork, the mortar rotted out in parts. I passed a bank of switches and flicked them, but nothing happened.

“Gary, slow down.”

Fisher wasn’t listening. When I caught up with him, I found he’d hit an intersection. The flashlight revealed only about eight feet in any direction. Darkness led three ways. The place smelled of rock and old dust.

“I don’t get it. We must be out under the street by now.”

We heard a sound then, from down one of the corridors. A moan, which abruptly climbed in pitch.

We turned together. The sound came back, splitting into something that could have been fractured laughter or someone choking, then broke into silence. It came from the left corridor.

“Down there,” I said.

He made her go right over to the corner. The thing in the chair was sealed into a plastic bag. When Marcus forced her hands to open the bag, a smell came out that was the worst thing ever, so bad that in the darkness it seemed to fill the universe. Her eyes watered, her stomach dropped out like seasickness, but instead of moving back he yanked the sides of the bag wider. He pushed her hands inside, needing to touch the last place he’d called home. From the smell you thought it would be warm, but it was cold. It was like stringy, fatty mucus with things in it, and there were bones. He made her come farther toward it, bringing her face to the gap, opening her mouth, as if he meant to taste the…

No way.

She’d thrown herself backward, flapping her hands spastically, and stumbled howling back into the darkness, frantically rubbing her hands on her poor coat, the coat now covered in dirt and blood and this appalling, horrendous crap. She’d gone running back across the room then, smashing into things and not caring, until she found another corridor and ran down it—and then into another, bigger space, not caring where she went because she knew now that all corridors were the same.

It didn’t matter how far you went. There was no escape from what was inside.

Gary ran down the left corridor. I began to smell something else, an earthier note underneath the dust.

We came to a doorway and stepped through it into a more open space. Forty feet square, a low ceiling, upturned furniture and wooden crates and debris all over the place. One whole wall was bookshelves, very old-looking volumes, leather-bound, most of them little thicker than notebooks. The room had thick concrete walls and was bone dry, but the odor was stronger here, far worse than the damp and mold we’d been enveloped in before.

As we started across the room, I stepped on something. It made a flat, crackling sound and gave way, dropping my foot onto something uneven.

I pointed the light down. There was a stretch of dark gray plastic beneath my foot, less than five feet in length, an uneven two feet wide.

“What’s that?” Fisher’s voice was dry.

I knew. I’d seen one before. It was a body bag. A good deal of packing tape had been fixed over the central zipper and reinforced the join at the top. The tape had curled a little at the edges, as if it had been in place for some time. I reached down toward it.

“Don’t open it,” Fisher said.

I peeled the tape back, found the zipper. Ran it down six inches. The smell that emerged was like nothing on earth. Fisher turned away jerkily. I shone the light into the hole. A face, or the remains of one. This person had been there awhile, sealed into a tough, nearly airtight bag. She had once had long red hair. She had not been very tall, or very old. Her face had been deeply sliced, in a series of wounds that together looked a little like the number 9.

I pulled the zipper back up, pushed the tape back down around the join. The smell did not go away. That smell is not just a smell. The brain keeps sending out alarms even after the source is taken away. It knows that this odor is a gateway to places you cannot go and stay alive.

Assuming I had removed the source…

I straightened up, remembering I’d been able to smell something of this as soon as we’d entered the room.

“Jack,” Fisher said. “There.”

I pointed the flashlight. Another bag, the same size, on the floor, partially underneath a table. I moved the light again. Found another bag, then another, and for a moment it was as if they hadn’t been there before we came but were appearing now in front of our eyes, multiplying to fill the space, coming closer, surrounding us.

And then one final bag. This was not on the floor but propped upright in a rotten armchair in the far corner, near another entrance. For a moment when the light bounced off the top, it looked like a face, though that must have been the folds, the remaining structure of what was sealed inside. This bag was a good deal longer than the rest. It had been opened, the sides pulled apart.

Fisher grabbed the light from me and pointed it to the side, fast. In the wall there was another door. I saw something in the corridor beyond.

Something running, like a shadow that had peeled itself up from the floor.

Fisher was in motion immediately, shoving a pile of chairs out of the way and starting toward the door. Over his shoulder I saw the shadow again, at the limits of where the light reached, vanishing around a corner.